Deadly heat waves struck Europe, North America, and elsewhere in June and July, shattering records and killing thousands. Smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires is spilling into major cities across the Midwest and East Coast, darkening the skies and making the air dangerous to breathe. People in New York, Chicago and other cities are told to remain indoors.

Disasters like these are becoming more frequent, more intense, and more deadly. This is yet another example of how the capitalist-imperialist system’s destruction of the environment has destabilized Earth’s climate and threatens the destruction of humanity and nature. These changes are pushing Earth’s climate beyond the conditions under which humans evolved and civilization developed. In 2024, according to the World Meteorological Organization, the concentration of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels reached its highest level in the last 2 million years.

Yet despite decades of climate disasters and increasingly urgent scientific warnings, climate change is not only continuing but intensifying. In 2025, more planet-warming gases were emitted than ever before. And the United States was responsible for about one third of the increase.

Despite what the Trump/MAGA fascists say, these disasters ARE the result of the changing climate from the burning of fossil fuels. Scientists can now estimate how much climate change has increased the likelihood and intensity of these events. World Weather Attribution concluded, “Such events [are] tens to hundreds of times more likely since only 2003 and virtually impossible just 50 years ago.”

The following examples from the past month illustrate the growing human toll of climate catastrophe:

• In Europe, a prolonged heatwave, lasting weeks, smashed through records. In England and Wales an estimated 2,700 people lost their lives. In France, temperatures reached 110 degrees and over 1,000 deaths were reported.
• In the United States, more than 185 million people—over half the population—were at major or extreme heat risk. Temperatures broke records reaching 115 degrees in some areas. It was reported that in New York temperatures were so hot that the soles of shoes stuck to the sidewalk. July 4 events, including Trump’s fascist state fair in DC had to be shut down. Over the July 4 weekend the heat resulted in at least 44 deaths. 
• As of Thursday, July 16, there were 858 fires burning in Canada, including 30 new fires that started in the previous 24 hours. One factor that has increased wildfires this year is a “snow drought” caused by a relative lack of snow and earlier snowmelt giving the forest floor longer to dry out, producing more intense fires that are harder to get under control. Smoke drifted across the continent darkening skies. Air quality readings in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis and Toronto surged to levels so dangerous that one public health expert said, “nobody should spend time outside.”

• While media coverage has focused on Europe and the United States, temperatures have been even more extreme in countries such as India, where the temperature topped 115 degrees. “I feel like I’m in front of a gas stove—or a fireball, I feel like I’m cooking myself,” one woman in Ahmedabad said as she pounded metal into buckets to earn about $4 a day. 
• In June, intense rainfall drenched the densely populated coastal regions of Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo and Nigeria in western Africa. The deluge overwhelmed drainage systems, triggering a series of flash floods. At least 34 people died in Ghana. Five died in Togo. In Côte d’Ivoire, 59 have died. Rescue teams continue to search for victims. The Guardian newspaper reported, “... scientists have concluded that the rains that caused the floods were supercharged by climate breakdown. Global heating, they say, turned what should have been a routine weather event into a climate catastrophe.” 

If the scientific evidence is overwhelming, why do greenhouse gas emissions keep rising rather than falling? In his recent major talk, HUMANITY ON THE BRINK: A Forced March Into the Abyss, or Forging a Way Forward Out of the Madness? Bob Avakian, the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism, exposes how the answer lies in the fundamental dynamics of capitalism-imperialism: 

“This system is completely absurd—criminally, monstrously absurd—and completely outmoded: long past its expiration date, past the time when it can lead to anything positive for humanity—and, on the contrary, it stands as the direct barrier to the emancipation of humanity from all this madness, atrocity, and unnecessary suffering.” 

Revolution has analyzed how capitalism’s underlying dynamics drive and intensify environmental destruction. This is available on the Environmental Destruction Resource Page at revcom.us.

These destructive dynamics are built into the system itself, but Trump/MAGA fascism has taken this to a whole new level. As Bob Avakian (BA) puts it in the same talk, “Trump ran on a platform of 'drill baby drill!'—and since coming to power he has opened up new areas, including public lands, for exploration and exploitation of oil and other resources—fossil fuels in particular. He has denounced, including in a speech at the UN, the reality of climate crisis as a 'con job': 'It’s a con job, only losers believe it...' And at the recent COP 30 conference in Brazil, the whole thing was a farce. They couldn’t even agree, even in words, on what would have been a meaningless pledge to reduce fossil fuel—and, in fact, as I’ve said, the plundering of fossil fuels is increasing—not being curtailed, let alone eliminated."

BA poses the real prospect of the destruction of humanity, citing specifically the threat of nuclear war and the destruction of the environment: 

Today, the prospect of “common ruin”—not just of contending classes and social forces, but of humanity as a whole—is a real and terrible prospect, as a result of the confinement of humanity within the awful relations and dynamics of the system dominating the world, the system of capitalism-imperialism. This gives concrete meaning to and underlines the urgency of my statement:

We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.